Mashey Report Reveals Wegman Manipulations

Mashey Report Reveals Wegman Manipulations

Strange Tales and Emails: Said, Wegman, Sharabati, Rigsby (2008)

The discredited Dr. Edward Wegman tried to blame a student for the plagiarism in a paper that has since been retracted from the journal of Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, according to emails released in a new report by computer scientist Dr. John Mashey (attached below).

The emails, originally obtained by USA Today reporter Dan Vergano, reveal that Wegman and his friend, CSDA Editor Dr. Stanely Azen, both tried to convince the publisher Elsevier to allow the discredited paper to stand, perhaps with an errata sheet attached as what Azen described as “punishment” for the Wegman team’s academic misconduct.

Mashey and the Canadian blogger DeepClimate have been the two most effective forces at discovering, analyzing and revealing the incorrect, plagiarized and academically incompetent work generated by Wegman, his collaborator and former student Yasmin Said, as well as other students including Walid Sharabati and John Rigsby in their ongoing attacks on climate scientists who contributed to the iconic “hockey stick” climate reconstruction graph (inset).

Earlier Mashey reports include Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report and Crescendo Climategate Cacaphony, both of which leverage DeepClimate’s research and then canvas in extraordinary detail the connections and manipulations that mark the Wegman campaign. The retraction of the CSDA paper is the first obvious result of Mashey and DC’s painstaking scholarship. This new report is yet more evidence that more dramatic punishments may still be in store for the Wegman team and for the Republican legislators (such as Joe Barton) and functionaries (including Barton’s staffer Peter Spencer) who originally engaged Wegman to launch the hockey stick attack.

Previous Comments

its completely outrageous what Wegman and crowd have gotten away with. Where is the outrage? Where is the New York Times coverage? What about Scientific American? Oh sorry, they are too busy lionizing discredited climate change denier Richard Muller.

its even worse than what anonymous said above. McIntyre is directly implicated in the Wegman deceptions. He was caught cherry-picking thousands of simulations to find a subset of ‘hockey sticks’, using a statistical routine that was rigged to produce them, and then lying about it and claiming that Mann’s algorithm produces such results. It is likely that McIntyre engaged in criminal conspiracy w/ Wegman, Peter Spencer, and Joe Barton. Read John Mashey’s earlier reports (search this site). McIntyre may end up suffering criminal recriminations for his involvement here. Stay tuned! We may eventually see that McIntyre perp walk after all!

…half of the “hockey sticks” generated from red-noise (per McIntyre) are upside-down. But Mann’s critics conveniently ignore all those “upside down” hockey-sticks. How’s *that* for “hiding the decline”?

Some followup material: For anyone familiar with the SVD algorithm (the algorithm that generates “principal components”, it’s quite easy to distinguish a “noise” hockey stick from a genuine “Mann” hockey-stick. All you need to do is look at the singular value magnitudes.

If the leading singular values are small, with the remaining singular values declining slowly in magnitude, then you know that you have mostly “noise” (i.e. little correlation amongst the different tree-ring sequences). That’s what you see if you apply the SVD algorithm to “red noise”. If this is the case, then you know right off the bat that you aren’t going to be able to extract a common temperature signal.

However, if you have just one or a few large leading singular values, with the rest dropping off close to zero very quickly, then you know that you have a lot of correlation amongst the tree-ring sequences, and that you will have a very good chance of extracting a common temperature signal those tree-ring sequences.

Give any competent analyst the full outputs of Mann’s “hockey stick” procedure applied to random noise vs. tree-ring data, and he/she will be able to tell them apart in two seconds.

If Mann’s tree-ring data-set produced singular values similar to what you get from “red noise”, he would have said to himself, “there’s nothing in this data to work with here – all I have is noise”. And then he would have “circular filed” that data-set and gone off to do something else.

hey loser. read the National Academy of Sciences report, or the most recent IPCC report, or any of a dozen or more recent studies. Not only has the Hockey Stick been “validated” dozens of times over, it’s been extended and strengthened. Here is some summer reading for you:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm
http://climateprogress.org/2010/09/21/hockey-stick-global-warming/
http://climateprogress.org/2008/09/03/sorry-deniers-hockey-stick-gets-longer-stronger-earth-hotter-now-than-in-past-2000-years/
http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Proxy-Reconstruction-Comparison-Uncertainty6.png
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-Past-Present-and-Future.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/compare_recons_with_crutem_1.png

Hi Rob,
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Sooner or later the sordid truth behind the Wegman Report will come out. Deep Climate has thoroughly analysed McIntyres archived code from M&M05, which Wegman used directly without vetting any of the statistical rigour (or lack thereof) behind it. You must read this:

Attorney General Cuccinelli cites this Wegman Report in his CID against UVA/Dr. Mann.

If the Wegman Report is finally judged by the professors at George Mason to be a big hoax, maybe people should ask Cuccinelli who helped him write all that trash in his CID.

I am constantly emailing Cuccinelli’s deputy W. Russell questions, but he never answers.

The Vatican, the Pentagon, the CIA, our scientific agencies, and all the recognized scientific academies of science accept that there is man-made climate change.

Perhaps Cuccinelli would like to call the Vatican a bunch of liars who are trying to steal our money and take over the world.

Cucinelli’s dad is a career gas lobbyist. I read on the Internet a brief comment that Cuccinelli used to work as an advocate for fossil-fuel interests, but there was nothing specific documented. Maybe this site could find out about Cuccinelli’s previous career.

In my opinion, Cuccinelli has hijacked the office of the Attorney General and has transformed it into a sinister political police/KGB for his family’s private financial interests. Cuccinelli’s AG office runs political operations against Dr. Mann and UVA. He cites academics who are stooges of the fossil fuel industry. He is persecuting Dr. Mann and lying about him. Cuccinelli is not protecting our people. Instead he is destroying people who are warning us of danger.

Actually The MWP has as much to do with AGW as the hockey stick.
As a matter science, neither are more than merely interesting.
As a matter of political value to advance an agenda, they are both very important.
The hokey schtick was pure propaganda and the MWP was the obvious flaw that illistrated clearly that the current minor optimum is nothing unusual and certainly not unprecidented.

The attempt was made to lie and wipe out a bit of long accepted factual history.
it failed.

What made you think that this research was better than the one done in:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/moberg2005/moberg2005.html

After all, that is just a blog post by a Very Rich family that want to take money from the state (charitable status, allowing avoidance of taxes), whereas that link is to a researched, peer reviewed paper from scientists that George W Bush hired.

Because we believe that ideas about the way the world of nature operates should stand or fall on their own merits, irrespective of the source of support for the person or organization that produces them

It seems more “Be polite, lie as much as you want, and we won’t let anyone call you out on it because that’s PERSONALABUSE!!”. The sort of attitude that leave truth to be scraped off the road after being run over countless times by liar after liar, I calls it.

PS note how the deniers want moderation to remove posts that burn their house of lies down but scream holy murder (literally) about how they’re being censored in the science journals and use as “proof” of their claims the fact that their ravings don’t get in reputable science journals that honour truth over false balance.

Anon, if you don’t like it here (but it seems you do), I suggest you start a blog of your own, just a few clicks away in WordPress. There you can dump as much toxic libel trash as your dear little heart desires, and not a censor in sight.

Do remember though to sign with your real name, so plaintiffs’ lawyers can find you.

Well, Dr. Wegman should be investigated, of course, how right you are… but as the post shows, some folks (like Dr. Azen, and it seems, influential people at George Mason University) feel more like protecting him. Very topical question!

Two people are debating in this thread, but each is posting anonymously - making it look a bit like user “anonymous” is arguing with him or herself.
Could each of you at least pick a pseudonym, and stick to it? We dont need to know your real names, but it would help to have two distinct handles to tell you apart, and to follow which of you is saying what.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.